Pasting text without attributes/formatting

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Jonathan Finney - 30 Sep 2005 15:24 GMT

When I paste text in an Office document such as Word or Excel (or anywhere
text attributes are supporetd), the text always retains the attributes of
the source document unless I use Paste Special.

It seems to me that I hardly ever want to paste in this way. I normally
want to have the text adopt the attributes of the destination document and
it's very frustrating to have to use Paste Special, then select Plain Text,
then click OK every time I want to paste in this way rather than just
hitting Ctrl. V.

It's particularly annoying when copying and pasting between messages in
Outlook as gives unpredictable results that are rarely what I want. And, of
course, Outlook
doesn't have a Paste Special option which means that to paste just the text,
I have to open Notepad, paste in the text, copy it again, then paste it
where I want it.

I guess I can work around the problem and create special short-cuts, but I'd
need to do this in every program and this is not really a workable solution.
Is it not possible to have the default paste action for all Windows programs
paste just the text without the attributes? Maybe a registry edit?

Does anybody know why this is the default behaviour? I find it difficult to
believe that the way I work is different to anybody else and can't imagine
why this is the default behaviour.

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Jonathan Finney

Finney

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Stefan Blom - 05 Oct 2005 08:44 GMT

As far as I know, there is no way to alter the default behavior of the
paste command in Windows. However, in Word, you can use a macro to
always paste as unformatted text:

Sub PasteAsUnformatted()
On Error Resume Next
Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
End Sub

Store the macro in normal.dot and it will be available for all
documents. You can use Tools>Customize to add it to a toolbar button
for easy access. See http://gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm

If you name the macro EditPaste (instead of PasteAsUnformatted), it
will replace the built-in paste command, which makes it even easier to
use, but this may not be what you want: For example, when pasting a
table in Word, it will be converted to text. You'd have to use Paste
Special to paste as a table.

Signature

Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

> When I paste text in an Office document such as Word or Excel (or anywhere
> text attributes are supporetd), the text always retains the attributes of
[quoted text clipped - 21 lines]
> believe that the way I work is different to anybody else and can't imagine
> why this is the default behaviour.

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Jonathan Finney - 10 Oct 2005 11:28 GMT

Thanks Stefan.

This is exactly the behavoiur I need. Having to use Paste Special to paste
formatted text is fine.

The only problem is it'll only work in Word. What I really need is to
change the default behaviour of pasting in Windows so it does this in any
program that has the capability to paste formatted text .

Signature

Jonathan Finney

> As far as I know, there is no way to alter the default behavior of the
> paste command in Windows. However, in Word, you can use a macro to
[quoted text clipped - 55 lines]
> imagine
> > why this is the default behaviour.

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